The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring

Sisley painted this view in 1875 from the great terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, looking down over the Seine valley in early spring. The terrace and the château behind it had housed the French court until 1682, when Louis XIV moved it to Versailles. Sisley keeps that old royal seat in the picture, but he threads modern life through the valley below: steam tugs haul barges along the river, and a railway bridge crosses it. In the foreground labourers work a vineyard while a single woman walks the bare orchard. The trees are only just coming into leaf, and the whole valley is held in the thin, cool light of a spring that has not quite arrived.